AAPT loving life without consumer business

AAPT has credited the $60m sale of its consumer division to ISP iiNet for bringing "focus" back to its telecommunications business.

Chief operations officer David Yuile told iTnews that the sale had "definitely drawn a line" in the sand for AAPT.

"Some people are still a little bit sad that consumer's gone, but most people say it's good [for the business]," Yuile said.

"We're an infrastructure company."

Yuile said that consumer division staff had stayed on in the AAPT building but had been shifted to a separate level.

"We put them on a floor of their own," Yuile said. "They'll probably move out in November or December."

Yuile also said that while iiNet would migrate parts of its acquisition away from AAPT, the Hyperbaric billing system would stay housed in AAPT's data centre.

"Picking it up and moving it didn't make sense," Yuile said.

Growth prospects

AAPT hoped to build on its strong finish to the last financial year that saw it take over $50 million in new business.

It signed or re-signed contracts with a number of major business customers in the half-year ended June 30, 2010, including with Rio Tinto, Austar and the SA Government.

AAPT was also talking up its prospects in newer business areas, such as its content delivery network EdgeCast, where it had "ten big deals in the pipeline".

It launched EdgeCast into the market in April, touting it as a viable alternative to content delivery network Akamai.

"We're running about 1.5 Gigabits [a second] of EdgeCast traffic [across the network]. When we signed [with them in April] it was doing 300-to-400 Megabits," Yuile said.

"It's very much a cycle of taking trial accounts, seeing how it goes and then starting small."

Yuile said that AAPT was continuing to find a strong market wholesaling its transmission and xDSL services to retail ISPs.

He said that symmetric mid-band Ethernet services - which offered uplink and downlink speeds up to 40Mbps - had been "picked up well in the SMB sector" and were now available from "just over 170 exchanges."

And the telco continued to win business in "broad scale IP-VPN deployments", Yuile said.

AAPT has also been reshaping its internal IT systems in recent months, including a move to a virtual Windows 7 desktop environment, the shifting of BlackBerry users to HTC Android handsets, and moving its corporate email to Gmail.